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Thursday, June 7, 2012

Gatsby goes to bat for hemp

He's pointing out that you can't get high from smoking industrial hemp, and arguing that it should be legalized. But wouldn't that make it harder to detect marijuana plants, which look similar but are illegal? Anyway, interesting priority for him on what has got to be his last lap on the Hill.

Comments (5)

To be fair, most of the fight is ridiculous. Farmers in Idaho have been trying to move into hemp farming for the last decade, mostly because it's much better-suited for their fields than many other crops, and the only thing keeping them from cutting into Canada's dominance in industrial hemp production is a gaggle of idiots at the DEA. (After all, if it came down to requiring actual testing of marijuana samples to prove it was potentially intoxicating, instead of merely claiming that it was a "green leafy substance," a lot of pot busts would fall apart. Stoners paying good money for old rope may be idiotic, but it's not necessarily illegal.)

Pot growers can't and don't attempt to mix their cannabis sativa in with the industrial hemp crop because the hemp will cross pollinate with the cannabis. Apparently in Canada illegal growers have attempted to intimidate hemp growers into giving up their crops because the hemp is ruining their pot crops. As for the risk that the farmers will grow big old pot plants instead of industrial hemp, I think that a trained DEA agent can tell the difference from a mile away, and issuing licenses to grow hemp will cut down on illegal growing significantly. I'm sure your typical farmer isn't going to put the risk of having their entire farm seized by the DEA for the benefit of making cash as a drug grower.

I'm glad Gatsby is spending so much time on the hemp issue. So pressing.

But the issue of CRC and "a bridge too low" he doesn't even weight in on. The height issue has been mentioned to his office, in the press, and requests specically made by river users noting the problem has been entirely avoided by Gatsby. What gives-are national, international and bi-state transportation issues not within a senator's basket?

Heh, this will never happen. The feds and local cops make too much money from asset forfeiture especially with cash strapped police departments (and they need to justify all the neat swat stuff they get from Pentagon cast offs).

Road Work

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